Autobiography of Mark Twain (112 page)

Hold Police Responsible.

At the opening of the meeting, the Rev. Dr. Charles P. Fagnani, the Chairman, said: “The management desires to disclaim all responsibility for what has happened. [Cheers.] The matter was taken out of their hands by the police. [Hisses.] We wanted to open the doors earlier, but our lords and masters, the police, took the matter into their own hands and settled it in their own way. [Hisses.] You have been accustomed long enough to being brutally treated by the police, and I do not see why you should mind it. [A voice: “You’re right.”] Some day you will take matters into your own hands and will decide that the police shall be the servants of the citizens.”

At the end of the meeting, Charles F. Powlison, Secretary of the West Side Branch, stated he had been asked to submit a resolution condemning the action of the police, but it has been decided it was better not to do so.

Mark Twain was introduced as a man “well worth being clubbed to hear.” He was greeted with a storm of applause that lasted over a minute.

“I thank you for this signal recognition of merit,” he said. “I have been listening to what has been said about citizenship. You complain of the police. You created the police. You are responsible for the police. They must reflect you, their masters. Consider that before you blame them.

“Citizenship is of the first importance in a land where a body of citizens can change
the whole atmosphere of politics, as has been done in Philadelphia. There is less graft there than there used to be. I was going to move to Philadelphia, but it is no place for enterprise now.

“Dr. Russell spoke of organization. I was an organization once myself for twelve hours, and accomplished things I could never have done otherwise. When they say ‘Step lively,’ remember it is not an insult from a conductor to you personally, but from the President of the road to you, an embodiment of American citizenship. When the insult is flung at your old mother and father, it shows the meanness of the omnipotent President, who could stop it if he would.

Mark Twain Got the Stateroom.

“I was an organization once. I was traveling from Chicago with my publisher and stenographer—I always travel with a bodyguard—and engaged a stateroom on a certain train. For above all its other conveniences the stateroom gives the privilege of smoking. When we arrived at the station the conductor told us he was sorry the car with our stateroom was left off. I said: ‘You are under contract to furnish a stateroom on this train. I am in no hurry. I can stay here a week at the road’s expense. It’ll have to pay my expenses and a little over.’

“Then the conductor called a grandee, and, after some argument, he went and bundled some meek people out of the stateroom, told them something not strictly true, and gave it me. About 11 o’clock the conductor looked in on me, and was very kind and winning. He told me he knew my father-in-law—it was much more respectable to know my father-in-law than me in those days. Then he developed his game. He was very sorry the car was only going to Harrisburg. They had telegraphed to Harrisburg, Pittsburg, San Francisco, and couldn’t get another car. He threw himself on my mercy. But to him I only replied:

“ ‘Then you had better buy the car.’

“I had forgotten all about this, when some time after Mr. Thomson of the Pennsylvania heard I was going to Chicago again, and wired:

“ ‘I am sending my private car. Clemens cannot ride on an ordinary car. He costs too much.’ ”

Yesterday, in the afternoon, I talked to the West Side Young Men’s Christian Association in the Majestic Theatre. The audience was to have been restricted to the membership, or at least to the membership’s sex, but I had asked for a couple of stage boxes and had invited friends of mine of both sexes to occupy them. There was trouble out at the doors, and I became afraid that these friends would not get in. Miss Lyon volunteered to go out and see if she could find them and rescue them from the crowd. She was a pretty small person for such a service, but maybe her lack of dimensions was in her favor, rather than against it. She plowed her way through the incoming masculine wave and arrived outside, where she captured the friends, and also had an adventure. Just as the police were closing the doors of the theatre and announcing to the crowd that the place was full and no more could be admitted, a flushed and excited man crowded his way to the door and got as much as his nose in, but there the officer closed the door and the man was outside. He and Miss Lyon were for the moment the centre of attention—she because of her solitariness in that sea of masculinity, and he because he had been defeated before folks, a thing which we all enjoy, even when we are West Side Young Christians and ought to let on that we don’t. The man looked down at Miss Lyon—anybody
can do that without standing on a chair—and he began pathetically—I say
began
pathetically; the pathos of his manner and his words was confined to his beginning. He began on Miss Lyon, then shifted to the crowd for a finish. He said “I have been a member of this West Side Young Men’s Christian Association in good standing for seven years, and have always done the best I could, yet never once got any reward.” He paused half an instant, shot a bitter glance at the closed door, and added with deep feeling “It’s just my God damned luck.”

I think it damaged my speech for Miss Lyon. The speech was well enough—certainly better than the report of it in the papers—but in spite of her compliments, I knew there was nothing in it as good as what she had heard outside; and by the delight which she exhibited in that outsider’s eloquence I knew that she knew it.

I will insert here a passage from the newspaper report, because it refers to Patrick.

Definition of a Gentleman.

Mark Twain went on to speak of the man who left $10,000 to disseminate his definition of a gentleman. He denied that he had ever defined one, but said if he did he would include the mercifulness, fidelity, and justice the Scripture read at the meeting spoke of. He produced a letter from William Dean Howells, and said:

“He writes he is just 69, but I have known him longer than that. ‘I was born to be afraid of dying, not of getting old,’ he says. Well, I’m the other way. It’s terrible getting old. You gradually lose your faculties and fascinations and become troublesome. People try to make you think you are not. But I know I’m troublesome.

“Then he says no part of life is so enjoyable as the eighth decade. That’s true. I’ve just turned it, and I enjoy it very much. ‘If old men were not so ridiculous’—why didn’t he speak for himself? ‘But,’ he goes on, ‘they are ridiculous, and they are ugly.’ I never saw a letter with so many errors in it. Ugly! I was never ugly in my life! Forty years ago I was not so good-looking. A looking glass then lasted me three months. Now I can wear it out in two days.

“ ‘You’ve been up in Hartford burying poor old Patrick. I suppose he was old, too,’ says Mr. Howells. No, he was not old. Patrick came to us thirty-six years ago—a brisk, lithe young Irishman. He was as beautiful in his graces as he was in his spirit, and he was as honest a man as ever lived. For twenty-five years he was our coachman, and if I were going to describe a gentleman in detail I would describe Patrick.

“At my own request I was his pall-bearer with our old gardener. He drove me and my bride so long ago. As the little children came along he drove them, too. He was all the world to them, and for all in my house he had the same feelings of honor, honesty, and affection.

“He was 60 years old, ten years younger than I. Howells suggests he was old. He was not so old. He had the same gracious and winning ways to the end. Patrick was a gentleman, and to him I would apply the lines:

So may I be courteous to men, faithful to friends,
True to my God, a fragrance in the path I trod.”

At the funeral I saw Patrick’s family. I had seen no member of it for a good many years. The children were men and women. When I had seen them last they were little creatures. So far as I could remember I had not seen them since as little chaps they joined with ours, and with the
children of the neighbors, in celebrating Christmas Eve around a Christmas tree in our house, on which occasion Patrick came down the chimney (apparently) disguised as St. Nicholas, and performed the part to the admiration of the little and the big alike.

John, our old gardener, was a fellow pall-bearer with me. The rest were Irish coachmen and laborers—old friends of Patrick. The Cathedral was half filled with people.

I spent the night at Twichell’s house, that night, and at noon next day at the Hartford Club I met, at a luncheon, eleven of my oldest friends—Charley Clark, editor of the
Courant;
Judge Hamersley, of the Supreme Court; Colonel Cheney, Sam Dunham, Twichell, Rev. Dr. Parker, Charles E. Perkins, Archie Welch. A deal of pretty jolly reminiscing was done, interspersed with mournings over beloved members of the old comradeship whose names have long ago been carved upon their gravestones.

The Rev. Dr. McKnight was one of these. He was a most delightful man. And in his day he was almost a rival of Twichell in the matter of having adventures. Once when he was serving professionally in New York, a new widower came and begged him to come over to a Jersey town and conduct the funeral of his wife. McKnight consented, but said he should be very uneasy if there should be any delay, because he must be back in New York at a certain hour to officiate at a funeral in his own church. He went over to that Jersey town and when the family and friends were all gathered together in the parlor he rose behind the coffin, put up his hands in the solemn silence and said,

“Let us pray.”

There was a twitch at his coat-tail and he bent down to get the message. The widower whispered and said,

“Not yet, not yet—wait a little.”

McKnight waited a while. Then remembering that time was passing and he must not miss his train and the other funeral, he rose again, put up his hands and said,

“Let us pray.”

There was another twitch at his coat-tail. He bent down and got the same message. “Not yet, not yet—wait a little.”

He waited; became uneasier than ever; got up the third time, put up his hands and got another twitch. This time when he bent down the man explained. He whispered:

“Wait a little. She’s not all here. Stomach’s at the apothecary’s.”

Several things were told on Twichell illustrative of his wide catholicity of feeling and conduct, and I was able to furnish something in this line myself. Three or four years ago, when Sir Thomas Lipton came over here to race for the America cup, I was invited to go with Mr. Rogers and half a dozen other worldlings in Mr. Rogers’s yacht, the
Kanawha
, to see the race. Mr. Rogers is fond of Twichell and wanted to invite him to go also, but was afraid to do it because he thought Twichell would be uncomfortable among those worldlings. I said I didn’t think that would be the case. I said Twichell was chaplain in a fighting brigade all through the Civil War, and was necessarily familiar with about all the different kinds of worldlings that could be started; so Mr. Rogers told me—though with many misgivings—to invite him, and that he would do his best to see that the worldlings should modify their worldliness and pay proper respect and deference to Twichell’s cloth.

When Twichell and I arrived at the pier at eight in the morning, the launch was waiting for us. All the others were on board. The yacht was anchored out there ready to sail. Twichell and I went aboard and ascended to the little drawing-room on the upper deck. The door stood open, and as we approached we heard hilarious laughter and talk proceeding from that place, and I recognized that the worldlings were having a worldly good time. But as Twichell appeared in the door all that hilarity ceased as suddenly as if it had been shut off with an electric button, and the gay faces of the worldlings at once put on a most proper and impressive solemnity. The last word we had heard from these people was the name of Richard Croker, the celebrated Tammany leader, all-round blatherskite and chief pillager of the municipal till. Twichell shook hands all around and broke out with,

“I heard you mention Richard Croker. I knew his father very well indeed. He was head teamster in our brigade in the Civil War—the Sickles brigade—a fine man; as fine a man as a person would want to know. He was always splashed over with mud, of course, but that didn’t matter. The man inside the muddy clothes was a whole man; and he was educated; he was highly educated. He was a man who had read a great deal. And he was a Greek scholar; not a mere surface scholar, but a real one; used to read aloud from his Greek Testament, and when he hadn’t it handy he could recite from it from memory, and he did it well, and with spirit. Presently I was delighted to see that every now and then he would come over of a Sunday morning and sit under the trees in our camp with our boys and listen to my ministrations. I couldn’t refrain from introducing myself to him—that is I couldn’t refrain from speaking to him about this, and I said,

“Mr. Croker, I want to tell you what a pleasure it is to see you come and sit with my boys and listen to me. For I know what it must cost you to do this, and I want to express my admiration for a man who can put aside his religious prejudices and manifest the breadth and tolerance that you have manifested.” He flushed, and said with eloquent emphasis—